


Plus One, Times Two

by Apostrophic



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s11e03 Plus One, Established Relationship, F/M, Friendship/Love, Motel Fic, Motel Files, Post-Episode: s11e03 Plus One, Season 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 20:59:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,578
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13555476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Apostrophic/pseuds/Apostrophic
Summary: Probably somewhere, in some parallel universe, there were two versions of them that could keep their hands off each other, that could look at each other and not radiate heat, that wouldn’t wreck what they had just to have what they didn’t.There’s a motel and a case in Virginia and two rooms with an adjoining door. Season 11, immediately post-Plus One.





	Plus One, Times Two

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lokisgame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokisgame/gifts).



Mulder flicked on the TV. He would leave nothing to chance, stacking the deck with each card he had at his disposal. He remembered the old days, those last years of fieldwork, adjoining rooms just like this one, where Scully would hear the tap running or the drone of ESPN and appear at his door like she had been summoned, pushing the door open, helping herself to his room and then his whole body like the rest of the day was not the part that had mattered. 

There was silence, right now, from her side of the door. Mulder leaned there and listened, braced with two hands before he took a step back, leaning into the doorframe to wait. He barely got his weight there before the knob started to turn. Scully pulled the door open. She stopped, part startled, part realizing of course he’d be there.

He met her gaze. _One one-thousand, two—_ that was as long as he lasted before the grin cracked his face.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
“Whoa,” Mulder said. “Nope,” catching the edge of the door Scully tried to shut in his face. “Nope,” Mulder said too when she regrouped from that tactic and started to step through his door. He seriously doubted that pull-out couch would survive a round two. 

He was laughing by the time Scully just cut her losses and walked into his arms. He tipped her head back, which she was shaking at him, and bent down for her mouth. She pressed her smile against his. Mulder kissed her again, wanting her to smile wider, this time holding the kiss until she pulled back for air. 

On the third time it lasted. Scully held the back of his head, then folded her arms around him and went up on her toes, not losing hold of his mouth. Mulder turned them both, stepping them back into her room, shutting the door behind them, this time with him on her side of it.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
This was what it was like. His tongue in Scully’s mouth never came with a set of rules. It was all feedback and instinct, something between them they created together. She pulled his shirt loose; he hated her slacks, not letting him grope beneath them like he could with her skirts. He unhooked her waistband instead, earning a hum from Scully. She’d never had a real chance— she had said that one time— when he kissed her like this. He wanted inside her brain first, and then inside her skin, which meant he played dirty to get there. Not that Scully did better. She kissed him hungry and shameless, a level of inhibition she’d had to work for last night. All the heat from last night welled up inside him again. 

Probably somewhere, in some parallel universe, there were two versions of them that could keep their hands off each other, that could look at each other and not radiate heat, that wouldn’t wreck what they had just to have what they didn’t. 

This universe suited him fine.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
On the bed: Scully stopped. Mulder was perched on the edge of the mattress, pulling her into his lap. “What?” he asked, innocent. She had his face in her hands, trying to give him a look that did not include smiling at him. He kept trying that too, to do anything with his face besides grinning at her. He felt thirteen years old. 

“Do you think one day we’ll get this out of our system?” Scully asked him. 

“No,” Mulder said. “Probably not.” Occupied with his hands up her blouse. She leaned her head against his, her fingers working on the lower half of his shirt. 

“You might throw out a hip,” Scully said, hopeful. She got his shirt open, pushing it back off his shoulders. “That might slow us down.”

“You obviously don’t know my hip.” The shirt hit the floor. “Or my threshold for pain.” 

The ceiling appeared behind Scully’s head. She brought him down flat on the bed, crawling atop him on her hands and knees. 

“True.” Scully sighed. Before Mulder met her, he never knew how a forlorn sigh could indicate happiness. “I guess we’re doomed,” she said softly. Her eyes glimmered dark in the dim light of the room. 

Mulder reached up a few inches, meeting her face halfway, not waiting for her to bend all the way down to his mouth. 

“I guess,” he agreed, several long minutes later, when he was breathless and hopeless and they broke apart long enough to toss more clothes on the floor.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Mulder could do this all night. It was the only time in his life he felt young again. Scully made him feel young, poring over his body, its lines no longer so lean, but still beautiful to her, if the look on her face was to be believed. She made him feel foolish and reckless and all the wonderful things. He cursed his misspent youth, when he’d thought sex had no point if it wasn’t rushed to its climax, fueled by adrenaline. How little he’d known. Except if he’d only known then that some day in his life a woman like Scully would open her eyes and look at him like this, it all would be worth it, he would do it all again. 

“Mulder,” she said now, trying hard not to beg. There had to be a word to describe the way his chest expanded and tightened at the sound Scully made at the tip of his tongue. Sweet and broken; like him, turned on by this for the rest of their lives.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
They had to stop for a drink. This was old age, Mulder pondered. This was part of the foreplay. A trip to the sink for a cup of cold water. Scully brought the cup to him, moving naked and dark through the newly dark room. Then again, it had merits, Mulder considered, propping up on one arm to take a long drink. 

Scully climbed back atop him, moving gently this time. He stretched back out on the bed, content with this vision for as long as it was on offer. Hair fell into her eyes when she leaned all the way forward, elbows bent, resting her arms on his chest. His riddled sphinx. Mulder pulled her hair up, catching it all with his hand, piling the long mess of it on top of her head. 

“What?” he asked, after a moment. 

Scully closed her eyes, dismissing the thought with a shake of her head. But then changed her mind, looking up at him from beneath a strand of hair. Her eyes shone, light and dark. “Santa Fe,” she said.

Mulder laid his head back. He could hear the smile in her voice. 

“Remember that?” Scully said.

Santa Fe. That first year on the run; they spent it out west, hiding. They had wandered the ruins. Mulder informed her one night, when a new low had been reached in their accommodations, that for the next six hours, he was only doing one thing. She could take it or leave it. They stopped to eat— ha— take a drink, even doze a few times, but he refused all her begging, refused to do anything else. Until they had both turned to liquid, the sheets stripped off the bed, nothing but sweat and orgasm. 

They had been a disaster. They had made it seem wise, the fact they had only each other. They reinvented themselves, stripped down their life to the basic animal needs. Food, shelter, water. Each other. For the first time in years, they allowed themselves to act on the depth and breadth of their hunger, having each other in exactly the way they had always tried to deny.

“Are you telling me something?” Mulder asked now, letting her hair fall, tangled, down the back of her neck. 

“ _No_ ,” Scully said, and turned slightly pink. “I was just thinking…” She shook her head again. “How were we ever that young?”

“I know,” Mulder said. With the end of his finger, he caught one strand of her hair, pulling it forward over her shoulder. Realizing, saying, “And we weren’t even young then. We were already old.” 

He rousted her up off his chest. Scully protested. Mulder only lifted the sheet, dropping it down around her, starting to disappear beneath it. She raised her head from the pillow where he had unceremoniously ditched her. “Mulder, what are you doing?”

He climbed back up her body to kiss her once on the lips, then climbed back down her body. He mumbled something against her, and then Scully said _oh,_ and that was the end of their conversation until the sheet was so twisted and wrecked it slid half off the bed.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
“I did not,” Scully said softly. She turned her smile towards the window, eyes closed, damp and flushed pink and satisfied. Headlights passed by the window that still shut the world out. 

“Did too,” Mulder said, whispering it against her neck. Satisfied and unsatisfied in a much different way. He had crawled back up next to her, sank into her arms. “Woke up half the building.”

“Well,” Scully said, her voice sex-thick and sleepy. “They’re probably still awake from last night.”

“Probably,” he agreed, liking this sensible logic. His smile lingered as Scully brought her hand up to the side of his face, brushing upwards to feel the rough growth of his beard. Mulder kissed up her jaw, provoking a small, silent laugh at the tickling stubble. She shook her head no, which was just rubbing her face against his, then sighed into his mouth. He licked the edge of her lip, one small taste just to hold him. But Scully raised up, folding her arms around him, kissing him simply and deeply. They breathed, lingered, went deeper. Her satisfied kiss started turning hungry again. “Mulder,” she said, when she finally broke it. 

He nodded, ready. Scully’s legs slid up around him as he pinned her hips with his weight. They would fit together this way; they would last forever this way. He raked his hands up her thighs, that tender, damp skin he had kissed almost raw, then tangled his hands in her hair and brought her face back to his. 

He had meant to say something. _Wake up the whole building this time,_ or something equally dumb so he could kiss Scully’s grin or make her eyes roll. But she had her hands on his chest, and moved gently against him, and he pressed his mouth to her forehead as she reached down between them and ended the part of sex where he had not been inside her.

Mulder felt it again now, at that first raw slide of their bodies together: the hot press of need in his chest, the way air didn’t quite reach all the way down in his lungs. Last night had been quick— relatively, for them— sweet and dirty. None of which was enough. If it took him all night, he wanted Scully wrecked up against him. He wanted her to sleep for twelve hours and then need him back in her bed all over again.

He didn’t want Santa Fe. He wanted a lifetime.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
“Oh God,” he said, “Scully.” An undetermined amount of time later. Muffled into the bed. 

Scully tried to stir. She mumbled something back at him, just sounds, unintelligible. Her leg trapped beneath his, flat on her back in the bed. 

Mulder forced his body to work, the bed creaking beneath them just like his joints. He crawled back across that last inch, laid his arm across her again. Held her pink-splotched, pale body, felt the sheen of sweat on her skin. Hair was stuck to her face. Scully only opened her eyes when he pushed the strands back, leaving his hand on her forehead. She kissed him, then smiled, in exactly that order, a colossal exertion. She licked her dry lips.

“Water,” she said, back to the basic elements, in the scratchy, raw voice of someone who had been through a fever. He would gather himself. He would crawl out of bed. He would find the cup on nightstand, bring it back filled with water. He would fall asleep in her bed, their legs twined together. Tethered, anchored, connected— whichever word he could get.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Mulder found the sheet, brought it back to bed with him. They curled up beneath it, not a stitch of clothes on, the pillows half on the floor, faint light coming in around the edge of the blinds. No more talking. Scully slept. Mulder laid there and held her, just like last night, awake. 

A lone thought crossed his mind, one of the few he had left. It made him smile. He had picked up her suitcase when they left DC, stuffing it in the trunk, debating his very good chances that a motel would be necessary instead of driving all the way home. Scully, reading minds, had given him one warning look and pushed up her sunglasses. 

Even that was like old times. She scolded; kept them respectable. She abided by Bureau guidelines, and then he woke up at midnight to find her standing over his bed. 

Had that always made sense? Could they ever sustain it? He saw right through her last night, the things she had said— like the inane proposition that there could be someone else with whom he’d spend his life. If he had to guess, she finally wanted to hear it, she was trying to get him to say it: _Stay here. I love you. Come home._

He would say it. He meant it. But that need of his was so great, he could smother her with it without even half trying. This was New Mulder: grown, matured, changed. It would be different this time. They wouldn’t be a disaster. They wouldn’t need only each other to the point he swallowed her whole. This time: no hiding out. They could have a real life.

Scully stirred, lightly snoring. Mulder held the top of her head and thought about the words he would tell her. _I’m really bad at this, Scully. But this is you and me, Scully. If I have to die trying, I’ll get this right._  
  
  


* * *

  
  
Just before 10 AM, they moved around in the room, restoring it to mild order. They had the adjoining door open, both sets of blinds open, both suitcases full. Scully kept blushing every time he brushed past. She gave him his toothpaste, packing their things from the bathroom. He gave her back the pajamas he found tossed behind pillows on the pull-out couch. 

“Well, we’ve done worse,” Mulder said, surveying the rooms. 

“We’ve done _better,_ ” said Scully. She gave him a sideways look. “I told you suites were too dangerous.”

He could always ignore her when she said something ridiculous. He hauled up his suitcase, zipped it shut, stopped at the door. 

“What?” Mulder asked her when Scully stopped there beside him. He waited for her to say whatever it was she wanted. 

Scully frowned, thought about it. “I’m starving,” she said. 

“There’s that diner we passed just off 95.”

“Which one?”

“Either one.” 

Scully, still frowning, stepped out into broad daylight. Mulder donned his sunglasses, bringing her suitcase out first. “All right,” she said finally. “As long as you’re buying.”

“I’m buying,” Mulder said, tossing her the car keys so he could pull the door shut. “You’re driving home.”

**Author's Note:**

> If Darin Morgan can pen a masterpiece twice a decade, the least I can do is some motel smut too.


End file.
